National Dictionary Day by Lois Winston
Noah Webster was born on this day in 1758. If
his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you have one of his
dictionaries sitting on a bookshelf. Among his many accomplishments, Webster
was an author, editor, lawyer, and political writer. Known as the “Father of
American Scholarship and Education”, his Blue-Backed
Speller taught generations of American school children to read and spell.
If you’ve ever wondered why English words are
often spelled differently in the United States than they are in Great Britain,
you have Noah Webster to thank. He disliked the complexity of English spelling
rules and streamlined them for American use. Thus, for example, we have “color”
instead of “colour.”
As an author, I owe much to Noah Webster. His
dictionary sits an arm’s length from my desk, and I use it often. But Webster
is also important to authors for another one of his accomplishments. He helped
establish the Copyright Act of 1831, which extended copyrights from fourteen to
twenty-eight years with an option of renewal for another fourteen years. Today
authors have even greater protections, thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976, but
Noah Webster got the ball rolling.
Today is also National Dictionary Day, which
was established to honor Noah Webster’s most famous contribution. He published
his first dictionary in 1806. A year later he began work on a more
comprehensive dictionary, which took him twenty-seven years to complete. During
this time, he learned twenty-six languages, including Old English and Sanskrit,
to help him in his evaluation of the etymology of the seventy thousand words included
in this massive endeavor. Twelve thousand of those words had never before
appeared in a published dictionary.
So happy birthday, Noah Webster! I couldn’t
have written Scrapbook of Murder, my
latest Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, without you.
Scrapbook
of Murder
An
Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Book 6
Crafts and murder don’t normally go
hand-in-hand, but normal deserted craft editor Anastasia
Pollack’s world nearly a year ago. Now, tripping over dead bodies seems to be
the “new normal” for this reluctant amateur sleuth.
When the daughter of a murdered neighbor asks
Anastasia to create a family scrapbook from old photographs and memorabilia
discovered in a battered suitcase, she agrees—not only out of friendship but
also from a sense of guilt over the older woman’s death. However, as Anastasia
begins sorting through the contents of the suitcase, she discovers a letter
revealing a fifty-year-old secret, one that unearths a long-buried scandal and
unleashes a killer. Suddenly Anastasia is back in sleuthing mode as she races
to prevent a suitcase full of trouble from leading to more deaths.
Buy
Links:
Bio:
USA
Today bestselling and
award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense,
chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction under her
own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Kirkus
Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery
series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition,
Lois is an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and
plots from her experiences in the crafts industry.
Comments